A glove for two hands. Life history of a fisher-woman along the Adriatic coast

Abstract

Abstract thesis The reflections contained in this thesis are a chronicle of my fieldwork in Italy. I explored a coastal community in a peculiar area called Trabocchi's Coast located in the Abruzzo Region, along the Adriatic Coast. My inquiry has been a video camera based fieldwork within and around the maritime area where I was born, thus identifying my fieldwork as a kind of anthropology at home. Walking with a camera, I tried to navigate through the life history of Anna Maria. She is eighty years old, she has never married and lives with her brother's family. She is retired but still paying regularly taxes to continue to work at the sea, jointly her boat Gloria. During the three months of fieldwork, she allowed me to explore, in depth, her way of life as a fisherwoman; to experience and perceive the relationship between people and seascapes; to know how people shape places making them meaningfully, how people are being shaped by places, through the activities they perform in these landscapes.

Film description Film Synopsis Anna Maria has been fishing since she was five years old. Today she is 83 and the oldest fisherwoman in Italy. Born and raised in a village along the Adriatic coast, her family was one of many fishing families in the region. Her father gave Anna Maria his knowledge and taught her the art of fishing - a tradition that is still strong within her. Over the years, the village’s fishing families moved on to other towns and harbors, but Anna Maria continued to travel the same seas that surrounded her since childhood. She is know by people of the region as “the bride of the sea”, but she considers herself just a fisherwoman. The sea has changed and the fish have all disappeared, but Anna Maria’s days are planned as they have always been, in accordance with the seasons, a lifetime of experience, and the flow of the tides. Her history is all in that tireless flow.